


Heat

by anneapocalypse



Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout: New Vegas
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-10
Updated: 2012-07-10
Packaged: 2017-11-09 14:30:43
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,865
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/456554
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anneapocalypse/pseuds/anneapocalypse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Carlyle's been holed up in his remote shack ever since the attack, just getting by from day to day, until an unexpected visitor drops in.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Heat

**Author's Note:**

> My half of a fic/art trade with [albertogang](http://albertogang.tumblr.com).

“Keep your distance. Who are you and what do you want?”

And what are you doing all the way out here? What’s _anyone_ doing all the way out here? What’s _he?_ It’s ungodly hot and despite his best efforts, Carlyle’s own voice feels heavy and anxious. Outside seemed like it might be a good idea, supposing the tension in his neck was psychological, and being out in the open might loosen him up. No cigar on that. But of course it’s no better inside the cabin. Sweltering and dark instead of sweltering and bright.

The stranger looks too much at ease in the heat. More than any human should be. Deep-tanned and dark-haired, simply dressed in fatigues and a dusty, vaguely-white t-shirt. Hard to guess his age, with his hair half in his eyes like that, but he doesn’t appear much older than Carlyle. He approaches the shack with confident strikes, which combined with the rifle on his back makes Carlyle instantly wary.

But the stranger halts in his tracks at the admonition. “Didn’t mean to startle you,” he says easily.

“You didn’t,” Carlyle says curtly.

“Ah.” The man shifts his weight from one foot to the other, crosses his arms in front of him, and then uncrosses them. “Well, I’m just passing through. Saw you here. Figured I’d stop and say hello.”

“Hello,” Carlyle says, cautiously.

It’s not that he doesn’t want to talk to anyon. Somewhat _starved_ for conversation actually, except that just the _thought_ of heading anywhere decently populated makes it hard to breathe lately. Even harder than the heat.

“Hello.” The stranger nods. “Not from around here, are you?”

Carlyle sighs.

“That obvious, huh? Yeah, I’m not from around here.” He narrows his eyes and adds sharply, “But where I’m from, they don’t want me, so that’s just as well. So I’m stuck under this rock for the moment. Any more questions?”

“Sure,” the stranger replies, shifting his weight from one leg to the other and crossing his arms. “You got a name?”

“Um, yeah. It’s Carlyle.” Carlyle climbs to his feet, dusting off his trousers. Now that introductions are being exchanged, it only seems polite. “You?”

“Nope. Don’t have one.” The stranger’s gaze drifts just slightly. As though looking at something just behind Carlyle. It’s unsettling. Gives him the urge to look over his shoulder, even though he knows there’s nothing there but the wall.

A man without a name. Burdened as he is with a name that marks him wherever he goes, Carlyle can appreciate the utility of being nameless. 

“So what do I call you?” 

“Most people just call me ‘Courier.’” The stranger nods as though at something far away. 

Strange man. But harmless enough, it seems.

*

Carlyle’s strange himself. His clipped city speech stands out in the Mojave. Marks him. Provokes smirks, jabs, _Y’ain’t from around here, are ya?_

No, not from around here.

Maybe it was his speech that made him a target. Wished he knew for what. Then again, maybe he doesn’t want to know. 

Anyway, he’s all right. He escaped. His build is slight but he’s stronger than he looks, and faster. He’s alive. He’s fine. He’s repeating these things to himself daily. And nightly while he lies awake or paces or tried to read by flickering lamplight. 

He is fine. 

Nothing brings sleep, though. None of the usual tactics. 

Just tossing, turning, until his neck and shoulders ache.

*

“You want to come in?” Carlyle asks the stranger, for lack of anything better to say.

Inside he immediately wonders why inside seemed like a good idea. Sweltering and dark. Carlyle leaves the door open to let some light in. “You want a drink?” There isn’t much in the barely-functional refrigerator but alcohol. Normally he’s not a big drinker but lately he’s been after the stuff a bit more than usual. Just trying to calm his nerves down.

A couple of cool, sweating beers make the awkward silence bearable.

The courier swallows, and Carlyle finds his eyes resting on the ripple at his throat before he looks away, trying to swallow the catch in his own. But the courier isn’t looking at him; his eyes have traveled to the rusty metal bedframe on the far wall, an innocent-enough glance that somehow has Carlyle feeling as naked as the dirty mattress.

“That your book?” the courier asks suddenly.

Oh – the old gray hardcover lying on the mattress. Carlyle bites back a _Who else’s would it be_ and dredges up a, “Yes – yeah, that’s mine,” from his unnervingly dry throat. Takes another swig of his beer.

The courier sips his own drink and sits back in his chair. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to be nosy. Just don’t meet a lot of readers out this way.” Reader. Not from around here. Marked again.

The man meets Carlyle’s eyes for a moment, then glances away as though suddenly shy. “I like books myself – it’s nice to see.” He rakes a hand through his black hair, which falls to his jaw. Where his short sleeve slips a little, Carlyle catches sight of some kind of tattoo on his bicep. The man runs his thick fingers around the rim of the bottle, a nervous movement, before he speaks again.

“Listen, I feel like I oughta tell you why I really came out here.” The words land like gunshots, and Carlyle feels every inch of himself tense. “I didn’t just… stumble across your house. I heard about you from a guy up on the strip, at the Ultra-Luxe.” The courier pauses, as if that name might mean something to Carlyle. Which it does, the Ultra-Luxe, the upscale casino, everyone’s heard of it, but Carlyle has never been there. Can’t imagine why anyone there would know him. Unless his father-

“They’re cannibals,” says the courier.

Carlyle nearly spits his beer across the table.

*

_Corn-fed, well-bred, no one to notice him gone._

That’s what they said about him, according to the courier’s story.

No one to notice. No one would have.

Thanks for the reminder. Bastards.

If he hadn’t gotten away. If they’d-

Carlyle downs the rest of his drink. “So you came here just to tell me that?”

The courier shrugs. “That, and to see if you were all right.”

Carlyle snorts. “Why?”

The man shrugs again, glances up at Carlyle then back down at the table. Then back up. “Seemed like the right thing to do.”

Carlyle looks away. His stomach’s suddenly gone sour. It would be almost absurd, cannibals in white gloves, almost laughable if the residual terror weren’t still coiled inside him like a spring, like something waiting to go off.

He tries to shrug and find himself wincing at the knot where his neck meets his right shoulder. “I guess if you were here to take me you could’ve done it already.” It’s the truth. Armed, muscular, this guy could’ve knocked him out in one hit.

But the courier is looking at him oddly now.

“Your neck okay?”

“It’s… stiff,” Carlyle admits. Which is a bit of an understatement. “It’s been stiff lately. Ever since the attack, I… haven’t been sleeping well. At all. Just nod off from time to time.”

“Oh, sorry to hear that.” The courier pauses, tracing patterns in the condensation on his bottle before continuing. “Well, I do have a bit of medical training? If you want, I could probably work that out for you? As thanks for the drink.”

The room sort of blurs for a moment, which is possibly just sweat running into his eyes, but Carlyle is suddenly struck with the memory of the last time someone touched him which was – no, he isn’t going to think about that, he’s fine and it doesn’t mean anything that this will be the next, it’s just a person trying to be helpful and –

“Sure,” Carlyle says, a little too forcefully.

*

Hands aren’t so much of a shock. He only flinches slightly. Focuses on breathing deeply, closes his eyes and tries to pinch away the headache starting at the bridge of his nose, as the courier sits cross-legged behind him on the bare mattress working strong fingers into his neck muscles.

It feels good. It feels strange just to admit it feels good, just to let himself feel that. His body doesn’t want to relax. Legs folded under him keep twitching. Hands are a little shaky. Carlyle wraps his palms over his knees, focuses on unclenching everything. Breathing.

He flinches again as practiced fingertips knead deeper, hitting those hard knots with small jolts of pain. The touch softens almost immediately and the courier’s voice breaks the stillness. “If I’m hurting you I can ease up.”

“No,” Carlyle says, the sound of his own voice feeling oddly foreign. “No, it’s okay.”

It’s okay. He’s fine.

Hands back to work. Kneading deep.

*

He’s thrashing before he realizes he’s awake, before he realizes he hasn’t been, bashes his knuckles right against the wall beside him. The sound of his own frantic breath halts him, then the awareness of hands on his shoulders. “Whoa, easy.”

Carlyle straightens up shakily, rubs his hands together and runs a hand self-consciously over his hair. “Oh god, sorry. I must’ve drifted off.”

“No need to be sorry,” the courier adds hastily, dropping his hands away from Carlyle’s shoulder, like he’s embarrassed. “I didn’t mean to-”

“You didn’t-”

Their apologies collide and break off abruptly in a thick silence.

“You don’t have to stop,” Carlyle says finally, and immediately feels terribly awkward. It’s likely the man _wants_ to stop. And leave. And forget all about this.

But then the hands are on his shoulders again.

“Feel any better?” the courier asks, massaging in gentle circles, voice cautious.

Carlyle rolls his neck slowly, testing. “It – does, actually. Feels a lot better. I – thanks. You’re good at this.”

The courier makes a self-conscious noise and continues massaging. Moves down to his shoulders, and then down along either side of his spine, under his shoulder blades, pressing deeper, working out aches he didn’t even know he had. The pressure of those hands seems to mute everything else, and he feels almost floating, almost as though the room is turning very very slowly, and as Carlyle’s heavy eyelids start to fall again he feels his skin faintly prickle, the air in the cabin growing cooler, the day’s heat breaking as evening comes on.

*

The second waking’s only slightly less of a jolt. It’s dark and cool in the cabin when he opens his eyes. Good god. How long’s he been out for? Did he lie down himself or did someone lay him there? A chink of soft white-blue light blurs against the dark in the far corner. Moonlight, through a gap between the wall and the shoddy roof. And in that bare light his eyes slowly adjust to a room not empty, and there at the table he made out the shape of the courier, head bowed, eyes on whatever it was his hands are doing. At the sound of Carlyle dragging himself upright, he turns his head, nods in greeting.

“You didn’t have to sit in the dark,” Carlyle says, rubbing his eyes, voice rough with sleep. God, he actually _slept_. “You could’ve put on a light, I’m sorry.”

“Didn’t want to wake you,” the courier replies, voice gone a bit shy again.

“Thank you.” Carlyle almost chokes on the words.

The courier shrugs. “I didn’t really-”

“No, I mean it, _thank you_. I haven’t slept like that in weeks. I just - thanks.” And it’s more than just that, more than just his neck and the sleep, it’s – how can he possibly explain?

“You should sleep,” Carlyle says suddenly, breaking the silence that’s crept in between them again. “You haven’t slept and you’ve been traveling – you’ve got to be tired.” He swings his feet to the floor. “Here – take the bed. At least for a few hours.”

The courier eyes him with what even in the dim light looks like hesitation. “You sure you’re not still using it?”

Carlyle pauses. It’s possible he _could_ sleep more, as relaxed as he is right now, but it hardly seems fair, leaving his guest to sit up in a dinette chair all night. “No, really, I – ”and the thought flashes through his mind that it’s a queen bed and they could easily both fit and then he feels himself blush furiously and drops his eyes, glad it’s dim.

When he raises them again the courier’s looking at him.

“I’m not taking your bed from you.”

“Then share it. There’s enough room.” Something about the dead hours of night combined with the best sleep he’d had in weeks is loosening Carlyle’s tongue astonishingly.

“You sure you’re okay with that?” Hesitation in the man’s voice. But there’s a _yes_ behind it.

“Yes,” Carlyle says, lying back down and stretching his arms over his head. “As long as you are. I don’t know how much more I’ll be able to sleep anyway, but yes, it’s fine. You should get some rest.”

*

Once the man settles in beside him, boots kicked off and stretched out on his back, the shack falls back into a comfortable silence. The nighttime desert chill’s crept in while Carlyle slept, and the temperature is more than tolerable at this point, even with another body so close. He lets his eyes close intermittently – sleep isn’t going to come again right away, that much he can tell, but it’s enough to savor the quiet dark, and the strangely comfortable presence at his side.

*

It’s sometime later – Carlyle might’ve drifted off, not into a full sleep but that sort of hazy halfway state – when he feels the movement of the man beside him rolling over, and opening his eyes he can make out that the courier’s eyes are open as well.

“Can’t sleep?” Carlyle murmurs.

“Nah.” The man shifts onto his side, facing Carlyle straight on. “Honestly, I don’t really sleep so well myself. Haven’t since I got shot a while back.”

Carlyle wakes up a little more at that. “You got _shot?_ ”

The courier raises a hand to push his long hair back from the left side of his face. In what moonlight remains, Carlyle makes out a round, puckered scar at his temple. “God damn. And you _survived_ that? Well, I mean, yes, obviously, but…”

“Yeah.”

Something dawns on Carlyle then, and he shifts closer. “You don’t remember your name, do you?”

“Nope. Don’t remember a lot.” Maybe a foot from his face, the courier’s eyes are dark, dark, distant but not quite sad. “What I do remember’s pretty fuzzy. Like it’s not mine.”

Carlyle gives a slow nod. “Did you learn how to give massages like that after? Or is that something you do remember?”

The courier curls and uncurls his fingers in front of his face. “Before. Hands are different. My hands remember, even if my head doesn’t.”

“Good hands,” Carlyle says.

A smile crosses the courier’s face. “Thanks.” His eyes drift down and it takes Carlyle a moment to realize the courier’s looking at _his_ hands, his slenderer fingers fidgeting with a stray thread from the mattress. He untwists the thread from his finger and slides his hand over until it touches the courier’s hand and the courier doesn’t pull it away and there’s a long moment in which Carlyle becomes aware of all the little noises from outside. The chirping of crickets and the louder trilling of cicadas. A low gust of wind rattling the rusty hinges of the door. From somewhere distant, the howl of a coyote. But over it all the hammering of his own heart.

When the courier shifts even closer Carlyle can feel his breath catch in his throat. Their eyes lock and some part of him pulls to break away, but he doesn’t, just steadies himself with a deep breath and stares into the courier’s dark heavy-lashed eyes, and notices the just-so-subtly-crooked bend of his nose seconds before the courier kisses him.

Just a tentative brush of lips, warm, gentle, and inviting. Carlyle returns it, just as soft, curling his hand instinctively around the courier’s hand between them. When they pull back he feels a sigh escape, a long one that leaves him shaky and with goosebumps all over his skin.

When he opens his eyes, the courier’s eyes are open again too, on him, lips parted, questioning. Waiting on him.

Carlyle slides in closer and their mouths meet again, really kissing now, slow and searching, hands still clasped between them until he lets his tongue brush the courier’s tongue and the courier’s hand pulls away and comes to rest on Carlyle’s hip, and he wraps his arm around the man’s shoulder, and they pull each other in close and kiss some more.

It feels terrifyingly good, not just the warmth of being drawn against another body, the shock of closeness that flares in his bones and prickles under his skin, but the way all of his muscles seemed to loosen even more, all the little minute aches he hadn’t even realized were still there, in his calves and his thighs, his lower back where the courier’s palm is resting now, and all over, suddenly and strangely soothed by the embrace. Carlyle leans into it and lets his fingertips rest along the contour of the man’s shoulder blade, almost weak with the relief of it even as his heart races with unrealness of it, wrapped up with a strange man in the dark under a sliver of moonlight in a shack in the desert.

Carlyle doesn’t want this to stop, doesn’t want to think about anything but this, especially as they kiss deeper and hold each other tighter and he feels the gathering heat in his body and feels it mirrored in the man against him.

The courier breaks the kiss for just a moment, the heat of his breath still close on Carlyle’s lips, and their noses touch, nudge each other, lips brush lightly as Carlyle traces fingers along the courier’s spine through the thin fabric of his shirt. The man draws him tight, presses his mouth harder against Carlyle’s and slips a hand under the hem of his shirt, warm against his skin, while Carlyle reaches down to tug the courier’s t-shirt free of his belt.

They undress slowly, piece by piece. No hurry. The courier seems to enjoy lazily working free each button, kissing along his jaw and then his neck as he slips Carlyle’s shirt off his shoulder. Carlyle’s in it now, totally absorbed because crazy or not this is the best he’s felt this whole godforsaken year and if you’re going to do something ridiculous you might as well do it right. He ducks down to kiss the courier’s stomach, sliding his shirt up a little at a time and following with his lips, feeling the growing unsteadiness in the courier’s breath as he moves to pull the shirt off over his head.

They do almost tangle their hands up going for each other’s pants, getting a little eager at this point and Carlyle likes that, likes it very much, likes the breathless kisses on his collarbone as the courier drags down his zipper. Likes the way the courier’s breath hitches when Carlyle slides a hand into his fatigues, and likes even the nervous flutter in his own stomach when the last of their clothes are pulled free and tossed aside, and he’s naked with another man for the first time in what feels like a very long time.

And it occurs to him as the courier’s thick hands caress him, the moonlight all but gone and their bodies only the barest shadows in the dark, to wonder if the courier’s had this since he was shot. What memories he has, if any, of being with anyone. But whatever his head has forgotten his hands certainly know.

Good hands. A broad calloused palm firmly cupping his ass, fingers tangling in his hair. Hands that explore his body, the contours of muscles and joints, like they’re something beautiful. It’s not something Carlyle’s used to, being touched and kissed like this, like he matters, especially now, And he throws himself into returning that, making his own explorations conscious and unhurried and caring. Because he should feel this too, Carlyle thinks, pressing a kiss under the courier’s jaw and tracing fingers along the well-defined muscles of his torso. It’s the little things that make it so good, so surreal, getting to know a new partner like this, when you’ve got all the time in the world to do it. Things he’s forgotten about. The soft layer of hair he feels when he runs his palms over the courier’s chest. The smell of another body, heady and distinct. The hot press of skin where they’re touching, the cool of the night air where they’re not. The sticky imprint on both their abdomens where they’ve pressed tight together to hold and kiss, then pulled apart so their hands can wander more. Carlyle drags his fingers through it on the courier’s skin, then reaches lower and feels him shudder at the touch, and then it’s Carlyle’s turn to shudder at the courier’s hand on him, fingers tracing veins and cupping around him and exploring with a touch that tickles pleasantly.

Good hands.

Explorations grow more deliberate, their touch on each other more fervent, all heat and sweat and the softness of skin and lips, the scrape of stubble on both their faces, all frantic and wild and dizzying and wonderful. Carlyle’s suddenly grateful to be out in the middle of nowhere with no concern for the sounds they’re both making at the sensations of skin against and skin and wet friction aided by tangled hands between their bodies.

And when they finally spill against each other, Carlyle first and the courier following, he lets a heavy, gasping groan from deep in his chest that feels like it’s carrying all the tension and fear out of his body to dissipate in the cool night air. The courier’s own groan of release, breathed hot against his mouth, settles inside him somewhere deep and safe.

Neither of them move when it’s over, just lie catching their breath and becoming aware of the chill of sweat cooling on their bodies. Foreheads touching, sticking together, a strand of the courier’s hair brushing against his cheekbone, Carlyle’s let his eyes close and feels almost like he’s floating. But before he can drift off, he opens them again.

The moon’s been rising, and has cleared the chink in the wall, leaving the room almost fully in darkness. He can’t even see if the courier’s eyes are open, but feels the man shift just slightly, and feels a hand come to rest against his lower back again.

Carlyle thinks of saying something, but in this soft sleepy haze he can’t think of much to say, and the courier doesn’t seem inclined to talk right now either, so he just rests a hand against the courier’s chest and lets his eyes close again. Leave the rest for the morning. Whatever the rest is.

Right now, he feels like sleep might come.


End file.
